It is true enough that the church is worldly. Like the world's younger brother we follow a few steps behind the spirit of the age, mimicking its swagger. That truth, however, ought not cause us to miss another truth- that the world follows the church. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that believers are salt and light, that we act as a preservative to a world swirling in a maelstrom of moral entropy. How easy it is to diminish this truth, to reduce it down to "Be nice, so your neighbor will be nice." The truth is, however, not only that the broader world becomes a less moral place when we behave in less moral ways, but that the connection runs deeper still. When we fail at X, odds are the world will fail at X, spectacularly. And in ways we won't like.
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It had been my plan to be in Virginia this week, teaching what we call Couples Camp, a small group gathering where we talk for a few days about the sovereignty of God, the family, and the kingdom of God. I looked forward to the trip, my old stomping grounds, visiting dear old friends, talking about issues that matter to me. In God's providence I am not in Virginia. I am not teaching, but am learning. I am not talking so much as listening. And worst of all, I am in some old stomping grounds, roughly 100 yards from the hospital room where my beloved spent much of the last months of her life.
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Any six-year-old child who has spent a few Lord's Day mornings in Sunday school is able to give an accurate answer to the question, "What did Jesus do for you?" Usually that child will say, "Jesus died on the cross for my sins." That's a true and profound statement, but it is only half of the matter.
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Shakespeare said that history is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The Christian view of history is quite a contrast; we believe God ordained it, organizes it, and moves it towards a meaningful, definite, and certain purpose.
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An issue that must be addressed before proceeding to an examination of the text of Revelation is our basic hermeneutical approach to the book. Over the course of the church's history there have been four main approaches: the futurist, historicist, preterist, and idealist approaches.i The futurist approach understands everything from Revelation 4:1 forward to be a prophecy of things that are to occur just before the Second Coming of Christ. In other words, all of these prophesied events are still in the future from the perspective of the twenty-first century. According to proponents, this conclusion grows out of a belief that there is no correspondence between these prophesied events and anything that has yet occurred in history.
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